Cullingworth nestles in Yorkshire's wonderful South Pennines and I have the pleasure and delight to be the village's Conservative Councillor. But these are my views - on politics, food, beer and the stupidity of those who want to tell me what to think or do. And a little on mushrooms.

Sunday, 29 July 2012

Marketing, professionalism and some advice from an "anti-guru"

Markets - go watch some, you'll learn a lot & it's fun

A former advertising colleague of mine was once, for reasons
of politeness, introduced as a “marketing professional”. Howard, my colleague,
politely and gently put us right:

“I’m a businessman. I happen to be in the business of
advising other businesses about marketing and advertising. Doctors and lawyers
are professionals. Like the people I work with, I’m a businessman, doing
business.”

This may seem a quirky response in these days when ever job
role aspires to being ‘professional’. The concept of doing a job and doing it
well or of being ‘in business’ appears to have faded. We have instead the
triumph of ‘book learning’ and the dominance of the ‘profession’. And because
we have taken the bait of “I’m a professional not some nasty rapacious
businessman”, there has arisen a vast industry stroking our professional
sensibilities.

From out of no-where springs the idea of ‘professional
ethics’; as if no-one besides the professional knows how to behave properly.
Maybe we’re still worried about being ‘trade’ and having to use the back door?
And given the behaviour of all those banking ‘professionals’ perhaps being an
honest tradesman (paid in cash, of course) is rather more appealing these days.
I note, however, that the bankers we blame are mostly either foreigners or
barrow boy traders. The professional bankers, quiet, calm and understated, slip
by unnoticed in our blame game.

This brings me, in a round-a-bout kind of way, to my ‘profession’,
that profession denied by Howard – marketing. In a free market (or the
over-regulated sort of free market we actually have) marketing should be the
thing shouldn’t it? After all it has the magic word – ‘market’ – stuck right in
the middle of it telling that we’re the ones who get that mystic (and invisible)
hand like nobody else. Except we haven’t got a clue and choose instead to
clutter round the knees of erudite – often self-appointed gurus – listening to
the latest re-hash of old truths.

I’d thought about unpicking one or two of these gurus. Maybe
Seth Godin with his repackaging of age-old sales principles as “permission
marketing”, and letting others misuse these principles to justify – yet again –
the pyramid scheme or the mathematically deranged ‘multi-level marketing’ idea.

Or perhaps I could describe seven principles, five
watchwords or 375 “things every marketer should know” – a process involving the
collecting of, mostly trite, observations and bundling them into some form of
schema. But the thought of this results in the guilt buzzer sounding as I know
that none of this actually helps make your business more successful.

Back in my direct marketing agency days, we coined the term “magic
wand” to describe what us account planners were to do in the bowels of a mill
conversion in Bradford. Businesses would arrive – often businesses doing OK,
making money, growing slowly, giving their owners a living – and ask us to
reveal the deep occult truth about marketing. To wave the magic wand that would
change them from a business turning over £750,000 and making a decent enough
profit into the world beating mega-business on the front of the newspaper
business section.

And we would have the sorry task of explaining that, despite
all the books written, all the gurus, all the conference speech with splendid
presentations – despite all this, there is no magic wand. Just as the bearded
maharishi doesn’t really offer spiritual enlightenment in exchange for cash,
the marketing guru won’t provide (in exchange for cash) the way for your little
business to become a big business. Those gurus will tell you this - it’s how
they sell their books – remember that Seth Godin didn’t become your friend or
even ask your permission before flogging you his book explaining how that’s the
way to sell stuff. Mind you we can pretend we’re his friend by following him on
twitter and subscribing to his newsletters.

But enough of this – so Seth’s made a load of money from
guru-ness, from our desire to find “The Answer”, to locate that magic wand, to
reveal the occult truth. And sometimes – gurus are very convincing – we feel we’ve
found that truth. Except that it doesn’t seem to make us richer or our
marketing more effective. Maybe we’re not following the guru’s strictures
correctly? Or, more likely, there simply isn’t a magic wand.

So, in the spirit of the ‘Anti-guru’ here are some things I’ve
learned about marketing:

Marketing isn’t about “free markets”. In truth, marketers
hate free markets as they make our job harder and our results less good. Us
marketers love monopolies.

Strategy is mostly a word used by consultants so they can
charge more money. Marketing is almost entirely about tactics. Strategy is the
easy bit – what market are we in, what route to market. It’s getting what we
actually ‘do’ right that makes the difference.

Marketing is 1% clever brainy stuff and 99% boring routine –
indeed this explains most people’s struggles with the stuff and the search for
that ‘magic wand’. That dull repetitive routine – capturing and storing
information, managing communications channels, monitoring and analysing results,
checking timings and all the other tasks that your junior marketing executive
is doing – is the meat and drink of effective marketing. Your high level
strategy and visioning conference isn’t.

And that’s it really. I could add stuff about product
development, about pricing or about the behaviour of that tricksy thing, the
human being – all of these things matter to marketing. But in the end the whole
point is to look for market advantage (ideally monopoly), decide what &
where we’re selling and get on with the daily grind of actually doing that job.